Data for Animal Behaviour article: The ontogeny of foraging in meerkats, a cooperatively breeding mongoose

Data and code required for running all the analyses and plotting all the figures presented in the paper: The ontogeny of foraging in meerkat, a cooperatively breeding mongoose.

Overview of files:

Focal watch datasets used for all the foraging analyses in the manuscript
- FocalWatches_PerFocalData: Focal level dataset used for the analyses of prey capture rate, digging efficiency, digging success, digging effort, surface prey & prey size
- FocalWatches_PreyData: Per focal sums of different prey categories caught, must be joined by FocalID to the above dataset to obtain model covariates.
- FocalWatches_DigBoutDur: Dig Bout dataset for analyses of the duration of individual dig bouts.

Code for foraging analyses
- MeerkatForagingGAMS_FocalLevel.Rmd - Code to run the models looking at foraging performance at the focal level and produce plots for the paper (Fig 1) and SIs.
- MeerkatForagingGAMS_Diet.Rmd - Code to run the models looking at specific diet components and produce plots for the paper (Fig 2) and SIs.
- MeerkatForagingGAMS_BoutLevel.Rmd - Code to run the models looking at duration of single digs and produce plots for the SIs.

Reproductive & growth data used for Figure 3
- LH_FirstDomAge: The age first dominant, use to create Figure 3b
- LH_FirstSexActivity: The first age that evidence of sexual behaviour was observed, used to create Figure 3a
- Growth_FrontClaw: Front claw measurements for the fitting of the monophasic growth curve
- Growth_Mass: Mass measurement for fitting the biphasic growth curve

Code for LH plots and Growth models
- LifeHistoryAnalyses.R - Code for producing Figure 3 and running the growth models that underlie some plots.

The IDs for Meerkats, Groups and Focals are unique to the datasets present here, so while they are joinable between the datasets presented here, they will not linked to other meerkat data. Additionally, while the code provided can generate all figures in the data, additional formatting has been applied to graphics regarding labels and text size before publication. All funding details associated with these data can be found in the associated publication.